Envisaged

How to spell envisaged

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce envisaged

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does envisaged mean?

1. verbFormed a mental picture of something as a future possibility; imagined or anticipated how something would turn out.

Envisaged in a sentence

• The architect envisaged a glass atrium long before the budget was approved.

• Nobody envisaged such a sharp rise in remote working when the office lease was signed.

Where does envisaged come from?

Language of origin: French

This word reached English from the French verb envisager, which was built from the prefix en-, meaning 'to bring into or make into', and visage, the French word for 'face' or 'appearance'. Visage in turn descends from the Latin visus, meaning 'sight' or 'thing seen', which is the past participle of videre, 'to see'. The earliest sense in French was quite literal: to look someone in the face, or to face up to something. When English adopted it in the early nineteenth century, the meaning softened into the mental act of picturing or forming a view of something in the mind's eye, which is exactly how we use it today. The buried 'visage' explains the spelling trap: the silent feel of that middle 'sa' and the soft 'g' come straight from the French face-word, and the same videre root sits inside familiar relatives such as 'vision', 'visible', and 'visit'.

How the word is built

• en- (to make into, bring about)
• visage (face, appearance, from Latin visus 'sight')
• -ed (past tense suffix)